E-Paper
After Diana inquest, scars remain
The emotional scars suffered by her sons for the way details of Diana's personal life were discussed and dissected in the open court will take time to heal, reports Vijay Dutt.
Blatant lies, half-truths, exposure of intimate affairs and sex life of Princess Diana, and scandalous allegations, could not sustain the decade-old theory of conspiracy to murder the Princess and her lover Dodi.
This seems to be evident from the direction and observations to the Jury by the Coroner inquiring into the circumstances of the fatal car accident in Paris.
But the emotional scars suffered by her sons, Prince William and Harry, for the way the lurid details of her personal life were discussed and dissected in the open court, will take a long time to heal.
Costing around £7 mn of public money, the inquest, which examined 250 witnesses, laid at rest the conspiracy theory kept floating by Mohammad Al-Fayed, Dodi’s father and owner of Harrods.
The Coroner Lord Justice Scott Baker decisively threw out the case saying that there was not a shred of evidence that the Duke of Edinburgh had conspired with MI6 to have the couple killed.
But as the Coroner said, there would still be people who would continue to ventilating the theory of murder, based on the premise that Diana was pregnant and the Royals did not want a Muslim step-brother to the two Princes. In fact Al-Fayed did react saying that the whole thing was biased.
The Coroner said the theories were “so demonstrably without foundation” that even the lawyer representing the Harrods boss was no longer pursuing them.
